Meet the Curator

His research has focused on the evolutionary biology of a wide range of parasites, from single-celled microbes to leeches. Siddall now concentrates on researching Darwinian selection and diversity of hemotoxic venom proteins of leeches, among them the new species Tyrannobdella rex (T. rex), recently described by him and his students, who discovered it in the Amazon. Intrigued by coevolutionary phenomena, in which species evolve in response to each other—for example, symbionts and parasites with their hosts, or predators with their prey—he has developed methodological strategies for the evaluation of these systems that continue to play a central role in our understanding of the emergence of diversity through time.